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The Week Ahead...
Monday, July 20, 2009
3:45 PM
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The House this week
will continue its march towards completing work on the twelve
fiscal year (FY)
2010 appropriations bills. On tap for Wednesday, Thursday,
and possibly Friday are the
Transportation-HUD and
Labor-HHS-Education spending measures.
In addition, the
House is scheduled to take up the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act
(H.R.
2920), which closely follows the administration's PAYGO
proposal. The bill would establish a new statutory form of
budget enforcement aimed at ensuring that future laws
affecting "direct" or "mandatory" spending such as entitlement
programs, or revenue reductions such as tax cuts, do not
increase the deficit. Thus, lawmakers must fully offset new
mandatory spending hikes and/or revenue reductions via
spending cuts or revenue raisers elsewhere in the budget, or
an across-the-board sequestration of non-exempt mandatory
spending programs will be triggered.
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"That process,
although similar to the statutory PAYGO system that was in
place from 1990 through 2002, would differ from the former
system in several significant ways," the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) notes in a
July 14 letter to House Budget Committee Ranking Member
Paul Ryan (R-WI). Most notably, H.R. 2920 would essentially
block a PAYGO sequestration for renewing the Bush
administration's middle-income tax cuts, Medicare's
"sustainable growth rate" mechanism for paying physicians, the
estate and gift tax, and the alternative minimum tax for
individuals. These extensions would spike future deficits by
roughly $3 trillion over the next decade, according to CBO.
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The Senate today
resumes debate on the FY 2010 Defense authorization
legislation (S.
1390). An amendment containing
hate crimes legislation
that was pushed by Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D-NV) has delayed a final vote on the bill until later this
week at the earliest. The hate crimes language passed Thursday
by a voice vote.
Under a unanimous
consent agreement reached last week, Senate Armed Services
Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) this week will
re-offer an
amendment cosposored by SASC Ranking Member John McCain
(R-AZ) that would
strip
the $1.75 billion in authorized funding -- approved by the
committee -- to buy seven additional F-22 fighter jets. A vote
on the Levin/McCain proposal could occur as early as tomorrow.
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House appropriators
last week wrapped up their work on all but the fiscal year
(FY) 2010 Defense appropriations bill. The full committee is
scheduled to mark up the defense spending measure on Wednesday
morning. A Senate appropriations schedule had not been
released at presstime.
The House Energy &
Commerce Committee today begins its third day of debate on the
America's Affordable Health Choices Act (H.R.
3200). According
CBO's preliminary analysis, the legislation in its current
form would increase the deficit by $239 billion over the next
ten years. However, CBO notes that its score on the bill is
incomplete, and is based on details provided by committee
staff as opposed to the actual bill text.
Get this week's
Senate committee schedule
here. A daily listing of House committee action can be
found here.
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© Copyright
Capitol Hill Reports, Inc. (2009). No claim to original government
works.
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